


wild horses

by goldenthrone



Series: at night [1]
Category: The Beatles
Genre: 1950s, Anxiety Attacks, Cancer, Child Abuse, Domestic Violence, Hurt/Comfort, I apologise, I promise, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Minor Character Death, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Smoking, but there's a happy ending, teenage beatles, this is not a cheery fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-02
Updated: 2016-07-02
Packaged: 2018-07-19 16:36:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7369393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldenthrone/pseuds/goldenthrone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes it feels like it will never get better. Paul’s English teacher calls home, concerned about his slipping schoolwork, and his father watches him with that silent disappointment face as he talks down the phone. He isn’t violent afterwards, just clipped and cold and “Paul, I expected better from you,” and it hurts more than the next day when he gives him a black eye.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wild horses

**Author's Note:**

> so i found the two thousand word exoskeleton of this from a little while back and couldn't leave it alone and this happened. do check the tags for any topics that may be upsetting to you !! enjoy  
> 

When it starts, Paul’s eight years old with scabby knees and holes in the soles of his shoes. His mother flattens his hair down on Sundays to go to church and packs him a sandwich and an apple for school every morning whilst his father reads the newspaper. He hasn’t yet picked up a guitar, not yet felt steel strings against his fingertips, and he’s only eight and he doesn’t really understand much yet anyway.

If the he seems a little withdrawn at school, nobody thinks, let alone says, anything.

-

It isn’t _awful,_ not to begin with. Paul’s through-and-through a lower class lad; you don’t grow up in Liverpool without seeing fights or knowing how to throw or take a punch or two. It isn’t awful because Paul doesn’t really understand that it’s happening. At first.

Paul can deal with drunken rages and flying fists easy. He’s small and quick and good at hiding and sometimes he can escape, escape the bellowing and crashing and the shrill screaming that answers. When he can’t, he knows what to do. The older boys push him around on the playground anyway, and scraped knees and black eyes can be explained away.

When he’s eight and a half, he’s sat on his bed listening to the wind and his wrist hurts where his father grabbed it too hard. He wonders if the other boys’ fathers hurt their wrists too.

The next day he asks his mate Charlie. Charlie looks at him like he’s grown a second head. “No,” he says in this appalled sort of voice. “Why? Did your da do that to you?”

Paul wants to cry, and his eyes sting, so he goes to his teacher and says he has a headache. It’s not really a lie because the echo of a mild concussion is still rattling around his forehead, and he knows that if he cries just a little then he’s got a ticket home. “You’ve been looking peaky all day,” his teacher says, and Paul wants to point out that that’s how he always looks.

That evening he sits alone at the dinner table and remembers Charlie’s expression and the incredulousness in his voice.

That’s when it starts being awful.

-

Sometimes, when Paul cries those tears that sting and flow and leave an aching cavity in your chest no matter how hard you try to stop them, his father sits him on his knee and says things into the top of his head.

“I don’t mean it.”

“I wish you wouldn’t make me do this.”

“I just get so angry sometimes.”

Paul barely listens. He doesn’t know if he believes him or not, but he nods anyway.

“Remember, Paul. You mustn’t tell anyone.”

“Yes, da,” Paul says quietly, and suddenly some sort of fierce anger and terror grips him and he wants to be as far away from his father and this house as possible, and then he starts crying all over again because he knows it isn’t possible.

-

The sun’s hot and unforgiving and Paul cycles to the corner shop at the end of Forthlin Road. His jaw hurts and his back is sore and he doesn’t have any more tears to cry, so he buys a gobstopper with his remaining pocket money and sucks on it for the rest of the day.

“Are you alright?” the lady at the counter asks. She’s frail and elderly with a kind face, like Paul would imagine his grandmother to be if she weren’t dead. He hesitates at the door for a second, the briefest spark of excitement lighting somewhere in his brain, and then remembers that he needs to wash the dishes or he’ll get no tea, and probably a smack. He doesn’t think he can talk anymore anyway so he nods and cycles home as fast as he can.

-

The most vivid thing Paul will remember about his mother is the colour of her hair. Blonde, almost peroxide, a stark contrast to the rest of her family. Paul will remember the colour of it in sunlight and the scent of her shampoo when she holds him tight.

He’ll remember the colour of her eyes when he pries her eyelids back and the smell of her perfume when he checks for a pulse and the sound of a cider bottle smashing over her head and the feeling of her blood against his bare feet.

But mostly, her hair.

-

Paul’s science teacher tells him to stay back after school one day while they’re filling out the periodic table. The kids sat around him snicker into their hands in that way Paul hates because no one can see.

Miss Holbury is nice enough, if a little overbearing. She has blonde hair like Paul’s mother and is nearly as short as the children she teaches. Paul is wary. He’s always wary, because there was a time that his father was nice enough too.

“Is everything okay at home?” she asks in the same stupid patronising voice as the lady in the shop asked him with not one week ago.

“Yes, Miss Holbury,” Paul replies, fixing his eyes on the floor and hoping his heart won’t jump out of his chest like he feels it will. He clenches his hands together nervously and doesn’t look up because he’s learned not to look people in the eyes when you’re lying to them.

Her brow draws. “What’s this, Paul?” She pulls up his shirtsleeve and points at a yellowing bruise from a week ago with a carefully manicured nail. Swallowing, Paul yanks his arm away. He realises with almost dizzying surety that he wants to tell her everything, and flickering static dances around his vision.

Looking at the ground, Paul scuffs his feet against the carpet. Miss Holbury waits patiently but her silence just fuels the anxiety fizzing in Paul’s stomach, and his father’s words echo through his mind.

_“You mustn’t tell anyone.”_

He swallows. “I fell over. In the playground.”

A sigh, and Paul takes an uncertain step back. It sounds like she’s angry, but instead she just looks sad. He doesn’t understand why she’s sad, not for him.

That afternoon it drizzles. Paul had planned to take his football down the park but he doesn’t want to talk to anyone so he goes to Penny Lane and kicks the ball against the side of the banker’s motorcar until he gets shouted at.

-

In the living room there’s an old piano and when he’s alone Paul teaches himself how to play. They use pianos sometimes in his mother’s records, and if he works hard enough he can play some of the melodies and the feeling of playing a song far surpasses the satisfaction of completing schoolwork. When he plays Paul considers giving up school and running away to make music instead.

The sensation of the keys giving under his fingers is beautiful and constant, and sometimes when he’s sat on the uncomfortable little bench with the sunlight on his hands he can forget what’s happening.

-

As all Allerton lads do one way or another, Paul learns how to swear, mostly through listening to the scary boys in leather jackets who patrol the docks with knives up their sleeves and paying attention to his parents’ conversations. They’re getting angrier and angrier, even Paul’s mother, who is usually gentle and kind and impossible to provoke. Sometimes he lies awake at night and listens to them shout and scream, and then squeezes his eyes tight closed at the suffocating silences that follow.

This boy named Adam in year six gets suspended for calling his teacher a cunt, and Paul’s mates relay the news to him through furtive whispers in the playground. Paul calls his father a cunt one day when he’s feeling rather defiant, despite not having a clue what it means, and holds his furious stare until his knees feel weak and sweat collects in his temples.

A few minutes later, he wakes up with his hair matted to the side of his head with blood and his arm bent the wrong way. He’s screaming before he even registers the pain and that’s the first time he goes to the hospital.

-

On his tenth birthday, Paul kisses a girl called Amanda, because Eddie from the other class had said that she fancied him, and that that meant she wanted to kiss him. She smells like fresh linen and she always wears her auburn hair in pigtails, no matter the weather. Afterwards, Paul blushes and rubs at his nose more than he should and tells her she’s pretty. He’s not sure if he means it or not.

The day after his tenth birthday, Paul thinks about kissing his mate Charlie. The thought comes to him very suddenly and unexpectedly while he’s eating his tea and thinking about Amanda. It nearly makes him cry, because if he tells anyone he’ll get called a queer, and getting called a queer means you like kissing boys and is a bad thing because it means that the older boys will beat you up and steal your money.

Noticing his silence, his mother asks what’s wrong, and Paul tells her that he’s not hungry and runs up the stairs before his father can shout.

-

When he has nightmares, Paul sings some nameless tune his mother likes to himself and pretends that he’s playing up on stage with the crowds screaming his name. Then he goes back to sleep and ignores the fact that he can hear his mother crying and his father shouting through the floorboards. After a while the sound of breaking furniture becomes background noise.

When he wakes up, he doesn’t remember his dreams.

-

Paul finds seven bottles of whiskey behind the kitchen cleaners under the sink, one with the lid off and half drained. He pours them down the sink just to satisfy the anger and spite that rears up in him. The amber liquid smells awful, like TCP, and just the stench makes Paul light headed as it swirls down the drain.

When his father hits him that night, he’s not drunk. He looks down at Paul and there’s no glaze over his eyes, nothing blunt and desperate and clumsy and just a little bit forgivable and human. There’s just anger and cruelty and every wound hurts ten times more because his father means it this time and Paul can’t call him confused or unaware of his actions, and he doesn’t know whether he regrets pouring away that whiskey or not.

It doesn’t matter, though, because a couple weeks later there’s a collection starting on the back shelf of the larder and the haze is back again. Paul decides he’ll keep it that way.

-

Sometimes it feels like it’s getting better. Paul’s Aunty Jin, a kindly, aging lady with electric red hair and an endless supply of boiled sweets gives him a record player and some old records and he spends hours watching the grooves spin, like a kind of therapy. He has no idea who sings them but it doesn’t matter because they’re his. His mother sits down next to him and sings along in her beautiful, soft voice. She dances him around the room like they’re actors in a romance film, puts on a terrible French accent like a budget Brigitte Bardot, mirth sparkling in her eyes, and Paul laughs more than he ever remembers doing before.

Sometimes it feels like it will never get better. Paul’s English teacher calls home, concerned about his slipping schoolwork, and his father watches him with that silent disappointment face as he talks down the phone. He isn’t violent afterwards, just clipped and cold and “Paul, I expected better from you,” and it hurts more than the next day when he gives him a black eye.

-

Paul works harder after that, even if it means that he sleeps less and misses breakfast in favour of running to school in the mornings. His teachers stop calling home and keeping him in after class and the warm happiness of having done well always replaces sour disappointment when he gets his test papers back.

He scrapes up the 11 plus exam and then he’s off to the Liverpool Institute, the stiff boys’ school where the pupils are older and bigger and tougher than anywhere Paul’s ever been. It’s better than Quarry Bank, though, and when he gets the news in an ominous grey envelope his mother laughs and picks him clear off of the ground and his father smiles, really, proper smiles, for the first time in years. He even goes as far as to clap Paul on the back complacently, and it’s the first time his father’s touched him in a way that doesn’t hurt for years.

It feels good. Like he’s not a failure.

-

The summer of 1953 is long and cool and Paul spends most of his time sagging off around Penny Lane and skulking for free sweets. He doesn’t want to be at home, and he brings Mike with him because he doesn’t want him to be at home either. Lately there’s been little shouting but more silence than Paul can deal with for more than a day at a time. On Saturdays they sit and watch the buskers on the street corner and occasionally put pennies in their hats just for the grateful smiles they get in return.

On a rainy day in August Paul’s mother, who looks increasingly worn and thin with every day that passes, takes him uniform shopping, even though he’s due a growth spurt and hasn’t quite lost his baby fat. The collared shirt and blazer are hot and heavy and carry a sense of foreboding that Paul doesn’t understand.

He ignores the boys who laugh at his uniform and call him names on his way to school. They think he hasn’t heard it all before.

-

What Paul learns about secondary school pretty quickly is that you can’t get by on four hours of interrupted sleep every day. It’s increasingly hard to concentrate and sometimes his maths looks like a foreign language.

-

The boys at the Institute are tall and fierce and wear their ties loose and their trousers tighter than looks comfortable, and they don’t even care when they get fingertongs for them. Despite what he’d like to believe Paul is only a five foot five and terrified of them and spends most of his time with his head ducked his fists clenched.

The boys at the Institute don’t care for ducked heads and clenched fists. In fact, when Paul looks back, he’ll recognise the sign on his back reading ‘target’.

On his third week Paul is being given a bloody nose around the back of the bikesheds by a boy that smells of cigarette smoke and leather. He calls him a queer and punches him around the jaw and Paul just takes it, just stands there and takes it because that’s all he knows and that’s all he’s ever done, and stems his nosebleed with his sleeve as he walks home.

-

Paul cycles to the corner shop again because the heating’s gone and the shop is warm and the lady at the counter calls him ‘son’ and gives him free sweets sometimes. He smiles his best and most charming smile at her and she pats him on the head and tells him to be careful. She knows about the bruises and takes every care to remind him so when he walks in the shop.

That night Paul thinks about the lady and wonders again if he should tell her, and if she’d even care if he did.

-

Paul can’t cry anymore because his bedroom door is missing, torn away in rage, and his father doesn’t like it because it gives him a headache. Paul thinks about the headaches his father gives him, the ones that seem to rattle against the walls of his head and ache in his sinuses, and cries under the bed where no one can hear him instead.

-

It gets so cold and Paul’s coat has blood on it, so he shivers his way to school and tries to ignore the goosebumps on his arms. The receptionist gives him one of those awful patronising looks and asks if he’s got a coat. Paul says “yes, ma’am,” while looking at the floor and pretends to listen while she talks to him about the dangers of bronchitis and pneumonia.

Even after he washes it, there’s still faded stains, but no one asks. Paul almost wishes that they would.

-

Paul composes sometimes, on the piano when there’s no one around. His songs don’t make sense and he forgets them afterwards.

-

Cigarette boy throws a pebble at the back of Paul’s head as he’s walking home and laughs in his ear. “Fight back, freak,” he says as he takes out Paul’s legs with a swipe of his feet, leaving him sprawled on the ground.

So Paul fights back and splits his knuckles and gets his lip busted and still ends up on the floor with cigarette boy cackling above him. For a split second the figure silhouetted in the weak winter sun could almost be his father haloed by the halogen lights of the living room, and something frantic pounds in Paul’s chest. He feels like a frightened rabbit. Cigarette boy grins like a shark.

“Better luck next time, _kid_ ,” he says venomously, and Paul hears the jingle of coins – his coins – as he turns to leave, and it’s only by sheer willpower that he doesn’t lie there in the alley and cry for a good while. He has to wash his coat again.

-

“I want to run away,” Paul says to his mother one day as they walk to the butcher’s. The sun is bright and warm in the sky, heralding the approaching summer, and glimmers in her increasingly dull hair, highlighting the gauntness of her face as she turns her gaze up to the sky. It’s almost like she’s praying to something. She sighs and rubs her eyes with her hands and her mouth curves into that peculiar shape that it does when she’s trying not to cry.

“Mum, why can’t we just run away?” Paul sounds desperate and whiny, like little Mike sounds when he wants something particularly badly, and immediately he chides himself. He’d taken it upon himself long ago to grow up.

“Because it isn’t that simple, love.” She squeezes his hand and smiles sadly. Paul feels the start of a tearful frown starting to pull at the corners of his mouth and sighs, frustrated. Everyday his mother gets thinner and more tired looking, cheeks hollowing out and eyes darkening, but still she stays. Paul used to think it was because she loved her husband. He’s not so sure now.

“You’ll understand someday,” she says finally, and takes his hand, squeezing it tightly as Paul blinks away hot, angry tears. He doesn’t see how that’s true, but he doesn’t say anything, and later on that night he thinks about what it would be like to live and not be afraid.

-

Paul finds sleeping pills in the cabinet, a bottle of fifty of them. They chase away the nightmares and sometimes he wakes up without being shouted at and no one notices when they go missing.

-

There’s a boy on the bus called George who Paul’s taken to sitting next to. He’s dreadfully skinny, lanky and younger than Paul, but only by a few months, and all it means is that he’s in the year below and Paul gets to act a little up himself every now and again. George is pleasant and actually quite witty, but most of all doesn’t mind when Paul’s having a bad day and won’t make much conversation. He’s quite happy to go on about guitars and Little Richard while Paul listens and nods.

One day on a Tuesday when Paul’s being especially quiet he asks Paul, “Why don’t you talk much? You don’t seem shy.”

Paul shrugs and fixes his eyes out of the window on the passing houses deliberately. Evidently his body language is quite obvious because George looks like he’s about to backtrack on his words, but Paul interrupts him first. “I just don’t see the point.”

It’s half of the truth, at least, but he doesn’t say anything about being scared to say something he’ll regret.

-

Christmas comes and Paul finds a Chuck Berry record at the foot of his bed, wrapped up carefully in newspaper with his name written on the corner. His father falls asleep at one, blind drunk on brandy, so he plays it on the lowest volume all afternoon and makes sure to thank his mother quietly that evening. She looks almost overwhelmingly fond for a moment and pulls Paul in to a practically bone crushing hug that smells like wine and French perfume.

After it gets dark Paul’s hungry and Mike’s pouting, so Paul cycles out to the chippie (which is, miraculously, still open, as all good English chip shops are on Christmas) and gets fish and chips for himself and Mike and feels strangely happy and full in the pit of his stomach when he drifts off to sleep. He thinks about Mike enthusing to him about Father Christmas and his mother’s expression when Paul had handed her a haphazardly wrapped necklace which he’d saved for months to buy and wonders if maybe the warm hum in his chest is how normal children feel sometimes.

All in all, it’s a better Christmas than last year when his father knocked him unconscious and his mother needed stitches.

-

Cigarette boy – Matthew Humphries, Paul has learned his name is – leaves school and entrusts the bruising to solely to Paul’s father. He waves and pulls faces at Paul on his last day and shouts one last taunt of “bye, faggot!”. Paul flips him the v and walks back inside.

After that, school gets better. Something about the boy had put the fear of God in Paul but now he isn’t afraid and he doesn’t walk with his head ducked or his fists clenched anymore. He finds that if he talks more, people talk back. People actually _want_ to talk to him, and somehow being known popular is better than deliberately being ignored. He even feels a girl called Holly up round the back of the science block and only feels minimally guilty when he imagines cigarette boy’s fit best mate there instead of her.

But, of course, only one thing at a time can be good in Paul’s life, and home gets worse.

His mother is frailer and whiter by the day, and it’s nothing to do with the cold, dark weather. Sometimes Paul can count the dark bruises on her arms. They mean that she can’t even leave the house any more, otherwise people ask question and his father shouts. She cries more, those sort of silent tears like she’s grieving that only come when she thinks no one can see her, face pressed into her hands and blonde hair hanging around her features like a greying curtain. Mike knows what’s happened to her and what’s happening to his brother, and Paul slowly watches him become more and more withdrawn and unhappy.

And his father just gets drunker and sadder and angrier and Paul has to sleep under the bed for a while and lays there every night with sobs caught in his throat.

-

One day Paul skips school with Andrew-From-The-Year-Above and spends the day slagging off their teachers in a graveyard near Woolton. Andrew is fifteen and has a fit bird called Alicia who hangs off of his arm constantly and is even growing a scraggly blond beard which is really quite shit but still impressive all the same. Paul feels a little in awe. They bask in the sun and Paul roughs up the edges of his voice a little to seem a bit more tough until Andrew tells him to stop it because he sounds like a chain smoker. Paul flushes and then Andrew actually offers him a ciggy from a green and yellow packet.

Paul takes it, thanks him like the polite fucker he is, mentally kicks himself and takes a drag. He regrets it even before acrid smoke fills his lungs and his chest is constricting and he’s fairly sure a good amount goes up his nose when he coughs it straight back out. His eyes water and his nose stings and the inside of his mouth tastes like ash. Andrew chuckles.

“It’s alright, you’re only a greenie,” he laughs good-naturedly as Paul holds the cigarette out to him between hacking coughs. “Try it again in a minute, but with a little less enthusiasm. Then see how you like it.”

“Alright,” Paul says, still slightly croaky, and once he’s stopped feeling like his lungs are on fire he takes another, smaller drag from the fag. This time it still stings a little but no longer makes an undignified exit, and when Paul exhales a cloud of the grey stuff he feels a little more relaxed. After a couple more inhales it’s almost natural, and Paul can feel all of the knots in his shoulders unwinding, the tension leaving his spine.

Andrew grins. “Like it?” Paul nods contentedly and Andrew lights one for himself. “You ever want a pack, you ask me, yeah?”

“I will.”

The next day Paul forges a sick note, hands it in with a smile and doesn’t even feel bad about it.

-

For his fourteenth birthday Paul’s mother gets him a nickel plated trumpet. She says that his father was once in a jazz band. Paul imagines his father and music together. It doesn’t sit right.

Once he’s got over the initial shock of owning something so valuable, he trades it in, along with a good portion of his savings for a guitar. He’d been eyeing it through the window of a shop in the city for weeks, but the price tag of twenty pounds had made his heart sink as soon as he’d saw it. When he first holds it, the strings tight and taut and the wooden body smooth and dusty, he immediately christens it the most beautiful object he’s ever seen.

For some reason his mother looks slightly disappointed when he shows it to her the next day, but still teaches him a couple of basic chords and a little melody from an old thirties song. She can sing so beautifully and when she opens her mouth it’s almost as if her hair loses its grey and her under eye circles fade and she looks twenty again, like she’s young and carefree and happy, and her joy is so infectious Paul can’t help but join in on the choruses.

“You’re so talented, James,” she says suddenly after they’ve finished a song, bringing a hand up to the side of his face, and the use of his real name throws Paul off guard. It’s the first time he’s ever been addressed by it in what seems like years and the sound of his father’s name attributed to him is somewhat jarring. His mother sighs and looks him in the eyes fondly, almost sadly, like it’s the last time she’ll ever see him. “So talented. And so handsome too.”

The way she’s looking at Paul is making him slightly nervous, the finality in her gaze disrupting the familiar butterflies in his stomach. He looks at the floor, and opens his mouth to bat away the compliments, but she beats him to it.

“I didn’t mean for this to happen, love. I didn’t. I’m sorry.” She laces her fingers, her big brown eyes going soft.

“I know, mum,” Paul says, and his voice is curiously thick, like he’s about to start crying. He stands up abruptly, the guitar strap pulling at his shoulder; can’t cry in the middle of the parlour in front of his mum, far too much self-possession for that. “Thanks for teaching me those chords.”

-

On the first day of July, Paul’s mother sits him down in the living room and almost immediately he knows that something is wrong.

It’s horrible weather outside, humid and positively chucking it down, and Paul listens to the _tap-tap_ of the raindrops on the window as his mother sighs and makes stuttered, abortive attempts at sentences. She’s cut her hair into a severe bob and it flutters about her angular face as she gestures with her long pianist’s fingers.

Eventually, “Paul. Love. I need to tell you something.”

“What, mum?” Paul says desperately, possibilities whizzing around his brain, trying to burst free as questions from his mouth because her expression is just devastated, making her look a good ten years older than she is, and gives no clues as to what the news is. “What is it?”

She smiles, just a little, a sad little curve of her mouth, which strikes Paul as ridiculous because now is not the time to be smiling. It makes him want to scream because she’s being so mysterious and furtive about it all and he’s got enough uncertainty in his life already. He just wants to know and frustration and fear is curdling in his throat into some awful, poisonous mixture. He grabs her hand from where it’s lying on the sofa, looking her in the face desperately. “Please tell me.”

Finally, she seems to string some words together. “I’m- listen, Paulie, sweetheart.” She stops, exhales through her nose. Paul squeezes her hand, not caring if he comes across as a little rude. “I – I don’t want you to worry, but I’m ill.”

Thick, heavy dread settles into Paul’s stomach like a bad meal and electric shock skitters up his spine. Despite the fact that the truth and gravity of her statement is sinking in, he grabs onto what hope he can find like a drowning man clutching at straws, clings to naïve possibilities. “But you – you mean; you’ve got flu? Or a fever? You- you’ll get better, right?” The pitch of his voice slowly ascends as his sentence continues until he’s nearly in hysterics.

“Oh, sweetheart.” She sounds congested and teary and Paul registers that she’s crying, why is someone always _crying,_ and then he’s crying too, awful ugly sounds that feel ripped from his lungs and she’s holding on to him as if he’s going to float away if she lets go.

“I don’t want you to go, mum,” Paul manages into her shoulder, but all that does is make her shake harder.

-

Paul goes numb.

-

His mother is in and out of the hospital from then on in. The doctors are all severe and talk with their hands clasped and their eyebrows drawn together seriously. They say a lot, mostly stuff Paul doesn’t understand or want to hear, but the gist of it is that his mother has aggressive cancer and that she only has a few months to live. Paul will never forget the sick shock that seems to rip through him at those words like an earthquake, setting off a high buzzing in his hearing, and when they start to talk about malignant tumours and chemotherapy and radium Paul tunes it out because he doesn’t want to know the details of what’s destroying his mother from the inside out. He just wants her to get better.

-

The nightmares get worse, so bad that even pills don’t help. Paul wakes up like clockwork every night at half past one, shaking and coated in a cold sweat with his ears ringing and shrill fear clinging to him like a sticky film. He barely sleeps.

-

They take his mother to a hospice, a sterile, stripped down myriad of identical rooms that reeks of sickness underneath the overwhelming stench of bleach they scrub the place down with. Home is hell without her there, so he sleeps over at his mate Ivan’s for a little while and they talk about music and fit birds and anything but his parents. Ivan keeps glancing at the purpling bruise on his wrist but Paul is too tired and fed up to care.

“You been playing your guitar much, then?” Ivan asks after a moment of silence. His hair is pushed back against his forehead in some kind of imitation Teddy-Boy look, the type of do that Paul would try with copious amounts of grease and then look at in the mirror until he’d convince himself that he looks ridiculous and regret ever trying it. His jacket, Paul notices, is leather, probably real, one of the ones in the shop fronts that all of the boys down the dock wears with pins in the lapels. A stab of jealousy twists sourly somewhere inside him.

“Oh, aye. As much as I can.” _Around the anxiety and wishing I was dead_. “It’s been difficult, though, y’know, with me mum and all.”

Ivan looks contrite and nods solemnly. “Aye.” They sit for a second quietly, until Ivan’s intake of breath indicates he’s had an idea. “I’ve got a friend from school who does guitars and all that. I could introduce you?”

Paul smiles weakly and shrugs. Just the thought of meeting new people and putting effort into budding friendships makes him feel tired and worn. Ivan seems to take the hint and doesn’t pursue the subject, and instead starts talking enthusiastically about the new movie starring some bird with huge knockers or something.

When Paul goes home for the first time in three days his father smells like a bar and smacks him and sends him up to his room with a shout of “I’ll deal with you later!”. Paul doesn’t really mind and lies on his bed looking at the ceiling in a placid sort of mood for a little while, listening to the children on the road outside laugh. The air smells fresh and green where it drifts in through the window and the heat of the day is the top end of pleasant, bordering on uncomfortable. He falls asleep in full dress.

Of course, his father sticks to his word and beats him savagely that night, but curiously Paul can’t find it in him to care, even next morning when he aches so badly he can’t move and he has to call up George to ask if he can stay the night at his.

-

One morning, Paul stands in a phone booth. He doesn’t have any money and he sure as hell doesn’t want to talk to anyone. It’s edging into winter and his breath clouds as he cries, condensing on the glass where the drops of rain look like horses racing each other to the finish line.

His mother’s dead.

She’s dead, gone, lying somewhere in a morgue or a funeral parlour or whatever, all stone cold and white and stiff. Her face is probably frozen in the same expression it had been when she’d died in that blindingly white hospice room, jammed full of wires and hooked up to beeping machines until she’d basically become mechanical herself and surrounded by a flurry of shouting doctors and nurses. And the last thing she’d ever said to Paul, holding his hand between her frail, shivery ones, was to “look after yourself, promise?” As if he didn’t already. And it makes Paul angry because that’s the most important thing, has to be in their life. In her death.

The rain reaches a crescendo as it pounds against the roof of the tinny little box. Paul glances at the receiver where it’s dangling after being left by its last user and considers calling someone, but instead he sits against the cold glass, brings his knees up and cries until well past dark and the rain stops.

-

Paul isn’t numb anymore. He wishes he was but all he’s only angry and tired and every time he thinks about anything his chest constricts and he wonders whether it’s worth thinking at all.

-

“What happened?” George asks when Paul gets on the school bus for the first time in a week. Paul knows he looks different; he feels thinner and paler and smaller - he hasn’t eaten or slept properly in quite a while and some of his drainies are noticeably loose around the waistline. George is studying him closely from underneath his eyebrows with his dark eyes and Paul feels like a piece of embroidery being picked apart.

“My mum died,” Paul says shortly, and looks out of the window just so he doesn’t have to meet George’s eyes. He’s seen the streets outside hundreds of times before but they suddenly seem fascinating.

“Oh,” George replies, and doesn’t say much for the rest of the journey.

-

The whiskey appears again, this time not even hidden and left with the lid off on the kitchen counter. Paul catches Mike with one, sniffing at the lip curiously, and snatches the godforsaken thing out of his hands, terror burning in the pit of his chest. He smashes it on the floor and Mike watches the amber liquid seep between the tiles with his lower lip trembling.

“Don’t you ever touch those again, understand me?” Paul asks sternly, even though his heart is beating so fast he feels it might stop suddenly. Mike nods and Paul tries to forget the image of their father he sees in his little brother’s features. Paul himself is lucky enough to have inherited his mother’s looks.

That night Paul doesn’t need pills because his father is furious and accusatory and he’s lying unconscious on the landing by nine o’clock.

-

Paul’s mother’s grave is in the Woolton church and says that she was ‘a loving mother and a loyal wife’. Sometimes George comes with him and they sit on the fresh turf in the snow and talk about music and fit birds and anything but his parents, just so Paul has an excuse to be there. They bring their guitars and occasionally Paul can just sit and play the songs his mother taught him and sing and forget everything that’s happening.

-

Soon the staff at school stop being as laid back and the weight of end of year exams is being held over Paul’s head. He’d like to say that he copes with it well but he’d be lying, unless coping well is having daily panic attacks at the foot of his bed. There’s days when Paul feels so despondent he feels like he might as well chuck his revision into the fire and go and live under a bridge somewhere.

The only upside is that he can use studying as an excuse to stay as far away from home as possible.

He pulls through them in the end and passes everything except maths, but it doesn’t matter because nobody really cares, much less Paul himself.

-

July is slick and hot enough to melt the tarmac but Paul’s too busy staring at the boy with the checked shirt and the greased hair singing the wrong words to ‘Come Go With Me’ to notice. He’s tall and skinny and plays ukulele chords on the guitar and squints when he smiles and Christ on a bike, Paul’s in love.

Paul very nearly has a stroke when Ivan guides him into a tent afterwards and introduces the boy as his friend with the guitars, John Lennon, and has to try very hard not to plaster himself all over the poor lad immediately. Ivan, earnest as ever, starts to gush about how good a guitarist Paul is and then John’s looking at him all scrutinising and Paul can feel the blush across his cheeks and the tips of his ears. Something about the stare John’s giving him through his long, intelligent eyes makes him feel like a butterfly with its wings pinned, stuck under a microscope.

“Go on then, play us something,” John says in his rough-around-the-edges sort of voice, a challenge evident in his tone, and his mate grins like a hungry lion who’s spotted his prey. Paul swallows nervously and hopes that the glare he gives Ivan conveys his violent urge to murder him accurately.

“Fine,” he says eventually, nerves thrumming, “but I’ll have to borrow your guitar.”

John raises an eyebrow and hands over his battered acoustic. The lacquer on the chestnut body is chipped and John’s been playing it so hard the strings are on the verge of snapping. Paul recognises it as thoroughly taken for granted and almost croons at it like a crying child, but stops himself when he remembers that most people don’t talk to musical instruments like sentient beings. Instead he gives it a strum, cringes at the tuning, and gets to work reverse-tuning the poor thing. John makes a protesting sound. “What’re you doing to my guitar?”

“Left-handed,” Paul says, waving his left hand to demonstrate. He’s surprised at the sudden burst of confidence in his voice, but here to impress, he figures, might as well show off a bit. “I could play it upside down but I’d just look a bit stupid doing that.” John huffs out a little laugh, and Paul tamps down the thrill of excitement that curls at the base of his throat at the older boy’s offhand remark of “clever”.

Paul’s nervous and his fingers almost – _almost_ – tremble, but he plays John and his snooty mate Twenty Flight Rock. His voice holds up well, not a trace of his nerves in them, and his guitar is solid and when he finishes up John’s got this little smile on his face that tells Paul he’s done good.

“Did I pass the audition?” he asks, doing a little mock bow. Immediately he wonders if he’s being too friendly, seeing as he’s only just met John, and, possibly for the first time in his life, tells his inner monologue to shut the fuck up. He won’t let anxious thoughts ruin this. Not this moment, which feels more important than he can really comprehend at the moment.

“I’d say so, son,” John replies. Paul beams at him and goes to hand back the guitar, but John interrupts. “Hang on. Play us one more?”

“I’m open for requests.”

John’s mate leans and says something in his ear, and then snickers. “Why not?” John says with a laugh. “What about some Gene Vincent?”

“You’re in luck,” Paul says, picking out the first melody of Be-Bop-a-Lula absently, and John cheers raucously. Taking that as a sign to start Paul launches into the unfamiliar song, one that he’d heard on the radio when it’d first come out a year or so ago, and when he forgets the lyrics halfway through and replaces them with noises instead John doesn’t seem to mind. He says he’s good, great, even. As Paul walks off with his heart in his throat John tells him to keep an ear out and Paul smiles, really, really smiles, for the first time in weeks.

-

Paul cycles to the corner shop because his father won’t _stop a_ nd anyway, they’re out of milk _._ What he isn’t expecting is Pete Shotton to ambush him with his arms full of bags, genuine sort of smile on his face, and say “I’ve got news from John.”

“John Lennon?” Paul asks breathlessly, clutching at the copy of the Echo in his hands like it might run off if he lets go. He rubs at eyes that still sting a little and takes a deep breath to steady the tremolo of his heart.

“No, John F. Kennedy,” Pete replies saracastically, as if Paul’s gone soft, and then gives him a friendly slap around the shoulder. Paul cringes away despite himself. “He says he wants you to come along to practice tomorrow.”

“Really? What time?”

“Seven, at 251 Menlove Avenue. Bring your guitar.” Pete hops on his bike, still balancing about a hundred grocery bags in his lap. “Oh, and come through the back door. Mimi’ll have your head if you ruin her carpets,” he adds as he cycles off.

Paul has no idea who Mimi is or what to expect at all, but for now he just tries not to cry with happiness.

-

It feels like it’s getting better.

-

The next night Paul shimmies out of the bathroom window and down the drainpipe with his guitar over his back and his stomach in a knot. Menlove Avenue is a fifteen-minute walk away but he’s late already, so he just hops on the earliest bus and pesters the elderly driver until he agrees to take him as far as Sycamore Grove. Paul smiles apologetically at the cranky businessmen on their way back from work and hops onto the pavement already humming vocal warmups to himself.

John greets him like an old friend, placing a firm hand on his arm, and Paul is torn between leaning into the touch and yanking himself away and hiding in a corner somewhere. His turmoil is quickly forgotten, however, when he spots five or six boys that all look a good few years older than him peering around the doorframe of the cellar. He swallows and smiles and hopes his nerves don’t show.

“Lads, this is Paul McCartney, guitarist extraordinaire,” John announces grandly, and there are about a thousand self-deprecating responses stuck in Paul’s throat; _not really, I can’t even read written music, you should hear my friend George play._

There’s a beat of silence, and then John laughs and nudges Paul’s guitar. “Go on, son, play ‘em something!”

Somewhere there is a kindly deity looking over Paul in that five minutes, and it goes well. He plays a Carl Perkins song called Lend Me Your Comb which he’s expecting them to laugh at, but they seem impressed and don’t even snicker at him and it’s a novelty that he hasn’t experienced in a long time.

-

It feels like it’s getting better until it doesn’t, and Paul’s dreams about John and performing in front of screaming crowds become intermingled with dark, stuffy things of bruises and belt loops and blood and he wakes up covered in sweat, the kind of which he can’t always determine.

-

“Get out of the house,” Paul’s father growls while Mike is cowering behind a doorframe and summer hail pelts at the window. Paul can’t see out of his right eye and he’s sure that if he tries to speak it will come out slurred and nonsensical, so he makes a desperate noise in the back of his throat instead.

His father takes it as an invitation to go on and throws his hands up in the air, bottle sloshing dangerously in a closed fist. “I don’t even want to look at you, you little piece of shit. Get the fuck out of my house!”

Paul isn’t going to fight. He doesn’t have it in him. He drags himself down the hallway and out of the front door, gritting his teeth as his head jars with every step and leaving blood on the door handle and carpet, maybe just out of spite. He looks forward to seeing his father grimace at the scarlet stains every time he walks down that hall.

There’s a bus stop not far from his house and Paul limps a few hundred feet in the torrential rain as it smacks against the pavements and catches the night bus, driven by an old chappie who looks permanently fucked off about something. For a minute he thinks about going to John’s but Mimi still intimidates him a little and he’s not sure if John even like him yet, so he opts for George’s.

The driver gives him a sideways look and says very quietly, almost too quiet for Paul to hear, “You ought to be more careful, sonny.”

Where Paul knows there should be anger, bright and raw, there’s just a sludgy sort of teary resignation in his chest. He sits in silence for the whole journey.

George’s mother is a short, plump woman with a kind sort of face. She opens the door on him, this mess of a boy all of tense muscles and bruises, and asks no questions, just ushers him into the house. Paul tells her he got in a fight at the docks over a girl. “Silly, really,” he says (or tries to around a mouthful of blood), as she fusses over him in the kitchen. “My fault.”

George raises an eyebrow from across the kitchen table at him and says something in his stupid deadpan monotone of a voice that would probably have made Paul laugh if he could hear it over the ringing in his ears.

-

One night Paul climbs onto the roof (something that he’d always wanted to do but had never really had the balls to) and sits and listens to Liverpool. The quiet, smooth hum of civilisation drifts over from the docks; car engines and people shouting and the faraway sound of the river Mersey lapping against its banks, and sometimes Paul falls asleep up there and wakes up to the sunrise.

-

A short while after Mike turns fourteen Paul’s Aunty Jin announces that she’s whisking the younger brother away to Northern Ireland, where most of their extended family reside. Paul’s close to his little brother – he has to be in a house like this – and it hurts when she tells him. He’s not sure whether it’s because he’ll miss Mike or because he wouldn’t miss Liverpool.

“It’s been hard for your father,” Jin explains. “I think it would… take some pressure of his shoulders, only having one boy to look after. Anyway, you’re a grown up lad now, Paul,” she adds, and Paul nods somberly, mostly because if he tried to talk he’d probably burst into tears. “Look after him.”

When they drive away Paul wants to scream and cry and run after the car and bang on the windows, beg her to take him with them. _It’s not fair,_ he wants to yell at them. _You can’t just leave me here by myself._

But they do, and when Mike writes postcards he sounds happy.

-

Paul throws himself into the Quarrymen. It’s better than drowning in his own anxiety, so he plays until the steel strings split his fingertips and the strap wears away the shoulder of his jackets.

-

To be perfectly honest, Paul doesn’t know when or why, but John starts to wait around at the gates of the Boys’ Institute and Paul would be lying if he said he didn’t feel a bit superior walking around with him at his side.

He’s not really sure why on earth John Lennon of all people is taking an interest in him. John goes for the rough, angry types with penknives and lighters, the ones that can grease their hair up in a perfect Elvis swoop and spit further than they can throw. Paul keeps to himself, mostly; he’s not unpopular, but he’s not exactly on John’s level either.

John seems to agree. “Yer practically a virgin schoolgirl, son,” he says dryly as Paul trots behind him down Penny Lane. “Dress you up in a nice pleated skirt an’ no one would know any better.”

They go to the docks and dodgy bars and down smoky back alleys where you can buy pills for a quid and Paul doesn’t feel afraid when he sees the older boys with their wide shoulders and jagged gaits. Somehow he can’t be bothered to be frightened of anyone anymore.

Sometimes, John takes him to Strawberry Field and they sprawl across the grass, faces tilted up towards the sky, and chat about anything that comes to mind. John is still and quiet and the sun makes his eyes glow autumn-orange as he talks about nothing to nobody, and Paul has to pick dead leaves out of his hair when they leave. He thinks about those sacred moments a lot.

-

Paul gets a girlfriend. Or a “girlfriend”, as he considers her to be. Her name is Dot and she’s sweet and timid and awfully polite, with a skinny, understated figure, the type of girl Paul usually goes for.

He’d probably enjoy having her around if he didn’t keep imagining John in her place.

-

“How’s yer ma?” John asks one evening as they’re walking along the docks, the sun setting over the Irish Sea in the distance and casting long shadows across the pavements. The question, which Paul realises John has never asked before, throws him for a second, like it always does and he almost lets his customary response of “alright, yours?” from before slip out of his mouth.

The smile he’d had on his mouth falters, but only a little. It doesn’t sting like it used to, though, and he stares listlessly at the ground for a second as he thinks up a response before replying. “She’s dead, but other than that I’d say she’s okay.”

John raises his eyebrows, a little stunned, and then looks very contrite, huffing out a laugh and rubbing the back of his neck.  It’s the first time Paul’s ever seen him unable to think up a response. Seeing John without a punchline ready on his lips is kind of like seeing a bird without wings or the sky without a sun.

“Sorry, should have told you before,” Paul adds, nudging John’s arm with his elbow. “S’alright. Year or so ago, now.”

“I’m sorry, mate,” John says shortly. Something about his tone, friendly and softer than his usual boisterous manner, makes the words feel more genuine than Paul’s ever heard them before and the silence between them as they walk back to the bus stop is more comfortable than awkward.

-

One Saturday morning Paul comes home at two am with frost in his hair and his acoustic over his back. It’s the hour where everything’s quiet and still and the sky looks like a solid black ink spill, and Paul finds himself subconsciously holding his breath as he walks down Forthlin Road.

It all leaves him in a rush when he sees light shining through the windows.

“Fuckin’ shit,” he curses to himself, his throat already closing up, and sprints back down the road.

John doesn’t seem overly happy to see Paul stood in the garden with a face like a thundercloud and shivering from the cold at one in the morning. John’s a little drunk, but not completely hammered, and motions irritably for Paul to come through the back door.

“But for Christ’s sake be quiet, or Mimi’ll ‘ave my balls hanging on the mantelpiece,” he hisses finally out of his bedroom window, before his long pale face disappears back into the darkness of the house.

Once Paul’s inside, John stands in the parlour with his hands on his hips like an angry girl, demanding an explanation. Really, Paul thinks, it isn’t fair; John shows up at his house random times during the night, chucking pebbles so hard they sometimes leave little marks on the glass that are certainly hard to explain away. But of course, it’s John, so now he’s being hung out to dry like it’s the bloody Spanish Inquisition.

“I. Uh,” he starts articulately, and then stops short the words that seem to be clawing and bubbling up his throat. “The, um, the lights were on back home. Me Da’s probably in a foul mood, thought I’d wait until mornin’ when he’s tempered out a bit. Y’know?”

John finally stops looking accusative and takes his hands off his hips. Paul quickly glances away from the thin strip of skin that shows between his shirt and ratty pyjama bottoms and gives John his best over-exaggerated eyelash flutter, clasping his hands behind his back in some feminine manner. “Don’t be angry with me? Pretty please?”

John grins like someone’s just thrown him a bone. “How could I say no to a face like that, doll?” he replies in a terrible Hollywood accent like someone’s nightmare of James Dean and Paul ignores the pleased shiver it sends up his spine as they creep up the stairs.

-

It’s the worst in the early morning, Paul finds, when it’s too quiet and the only thing he can hear is his thoughts.

-

Paul sees cigarette boy for the last time down a back alley near the Cavern. He’s with John, who has a fag-end in his mouth and is nattering on to him about a fight he’d had the other day with an American sailor down at the docks. Cigarette boy leers at him as soon as he sees him, chucking his own ciggy under his heel, and looks like he’s about to shout some insult at him when he spots John’s figure on Paul’s other side. John may only be the same height as Paul, but in his leathers and tall Cuban-heeled boots with his hair greased back and a few pints in him he’s got plenty of presence and is obviously not someone to fuck around with. Cigarette boy scowls, goes decidedly quiet and nudges his mate in a follow me gesture, spitting over his shoulder at Paul as he retreats, and Paul just smiles back.

“What an arse,” John says under his breath. Paul hadn’t noticed he’d been watching because he hadn’t even stopped talking. “You even know him, Macca?”

“Some dickhead who used to go to my school,” Paul replies, and feels a smug sort of excitement rise up in his chest. “He’s compensating for something; can you tell?”

-

After a while the sting of abandonment starts to dull and Paul calls Mike. He sits on the floor of the hallway with the phone pressed tight to his ear and the cable clutched in his fist like a lifeline and listens to his little brother talk about the cities and the weather and the people in Ireland. He doesn’t sound frightened like he used to, and he never asks about their father. Paul doesn’t blame him.

They talk until five, when Paul hears his father’s car pull up in the drive and ends the call with a hurried, stunted “Bye. See you.” He doesn’t wait for Mike’s response.

-

Stuart Sutcliffe is a twat.

It’s not like Paul’s jealous or anything. Not at all. He’s just sick of Stu and his perfect fucking jawline and his bass and the way he talks in an affected sort of voice that’s supposed to sound meaningful and artsy. He hates the way Stu looks down on him like he’s a child, like he knows nothing about anything despite only being a couple years younger than him. It makes Paul want to give him a smack.

Christ, he’s everything that John hates – pretentious, arrogant and proper posh (with the ‘o’ drawn out, of course). By definition, John should despise him, but no –  Stu’s got him on a leash like a fucking puppy dog; got John trained in trailing around after him and cackling at every shitty joke he makes and cancelling plans with Paul presumably just to trot around wiping Stu’s royal fucking _arse_.

Paul’s not jealous.

-

Inevitably, Dot sometimes sees the bruises and the tiny raised cigarette burn scars on his shoulders and back. She asks where they come from. Paul replies the same way each time – “got into a fight. It happens.”

The thing about Dot is that she’s not as silly and airheaded as people think when they look at her. She can make Paul feel guilty like no one else can, with her pouty mouth like she’s constantly about to cry and big, soft brown eyes like his mother’s, and utilises it often. She just looks at him with this sad, disbelieving expression and sighs. “Alright, Paul.”

He hates how she makes him feel. Almost like his mother could.

-

Sometimes Paul’s overtaken by the urge to do something, to just do something to stop all of this and take control of something for once. What he would do, he’s not entirely sure. The need for it fizzes at his pulse points, electric anticipation burning in his blood, and he lies in bed unable to sleep past the excitement for something that he doesn’t recognise.

-

John finds out.

He knocks on the door on a stormy, humid Saturday and Paul’s unconscious upstairs. He can’t remember what for but he’s sure at some point he was shouting and brought up his mother. Thankfully, his father’s out and no one answers, but of course the cheeky bugger climbs up the drainpipe at the back.

Paul’s bloody and bruised and broken, arm twisted underneath him and scarlet drying in the dip of his collarbone, and John wakes him up by tapping him on the cheek repeatedly. Paul just looks at him and John back and it’s the first time Paul’s ever seen him speechless.

“Christ, Macca,” is all John manages eventually. “What did you do this time?”

“I didn’t-” Paul starts, and then stops because his throat is quickly closing up and crying is something he definitely doesn’t want to do in John’s presence. John is looking at him, long eyes scrutinising and soft all at once and hands held awkwardly at his side, balled up into fists. He takes an uncertain step towards the door.

“I can go if you want,” he says hesitantly, and that springs Paul into action. There’s about a million different things one could deduce from this situation and Paul definitely doesn’t want John to go away believing the wrong one.

“No! No- wait,” he says quickly, and John turns back around. “My- me da,” Paul starts, words stuck in his throat and coming out all pitchy and wobbly, like they do after a long night of singing. He feels heavy with resignation, like his bones are made of lead and his veins carrying molten steel. “He drinks a lot.”

He promises himself he won’t cry. He does eventually, though, hiccups his way through an explanation and then just sobs and holds his probably sprained wrist and just doesn’t look at John, and once he’s calmed down John tells him to get his arm sorted at the hospital and slips out the back window.

The next time they see each other is a week later at practice. Paul has made his mind up to deliberately ignore John and wait for this whole thing to blow over but John pulls him aside as soon he walks through the door of Mrs Shotton’s house. He promises he won’t tell anyone in a low, secretive voice with the start of a sympathetic smile on his lips. Paul nods, even though he’s not sure if he’d care about people knowing anymore.

-

Paul cycles to the corner shop and busks from the early morning to late at night. He earns a pound and pretends that he’s been studying when his father gets home.

It feels odd, having money in his pocket, so he cycles to the dock the next day and buys a jacket because his old one has a gaping hole in the shoulder. He figures that a new pair of trousers can wait. He can live with barely any knees in them for a few more weeks.

-

The sun is shining and John’s mother dies.

Paul gets the news from Pete the day after it happens. She was hit by a car, Pete says, a police officer off duty and completely sloshed, almost the polar opposite of how Paul’s mother died. Slow and drawn out as opposed to quick and unexpected. Paul isn’t sure which way he’d have preferred it.

He stands in the phone booth for three hours with the fierce heat burning his face and uses up all of his money – he didn’t need new shoes anyway – and listens to John cry these bitter, breathless tears and rant and shout and throw things. At some point John starts just crying and Paul sits in amongst the fag-ends and dirt with the receiver against his ear and listens and doesn’t talk because talking doesn’t help, not in a situation like this.

“How do you do it?” John says thickly after a little while of silence, voice quiet and crackly. “You’ve gotta tell me ‘ow you do it, Paul, Jesus Christ. There’s gotta be a way.”

Paul is quiet again for a second. He considers lying through his teeth and telling John that it’ll all be fine and that the gaping hole in his chest that swallows all his air when he thinks about Mary has gone. There’s about a million minutes of flowery shit he could spout, all of the stuff he’s tried to tell himself over the years.

Eventually he sighs. “I don’t do it, John.”

And then John just cries even harder and that night Paul dreams about his mother and her hair and the sound of a heart monitor.

-

Because he hasn’t really got much else to do these days, Paul takes a train with Dot up to Blackpool on a rare sunny day. It’s not that he doesn’t like her, she’s actually very sweet and good company when she needs to be, but Paul’s sure there’s supposed to be some sort of ‘spark’ when he looks at her. And there isn’t. Maybe friendly affection, but nothing more. Besides, taking her out somewhere nicer than Merseyside makes him feel less guilty about all the times he’s left her high and dry.

“Thanks for this, Paul,” she says on the train home, squeezing his hand where it’s entwined with hers between them. Paul thinks she looks a bit sad, her eyes downturned to the floor and pretty little mouth in a bitter sort of smile. He nudges her gently.

“What’s wrong, love?”

A sigh, and she shrugs. She’s wearing a sheer, floaty, floral blouse that’s lose around her shoulders and it slips down one arm, baring a pale white plane of skin that probably should excite something in Paul but doesn’t. In fact, her bra had been visible in the sun for most of the day but he couldn’t even bring himself to look at it for fear of confirming what he already knows about himself. “You’re so quiet these days. I don’t see why you don’t tell someone.”

This time it’s Paul’s turn to go silent, and he takes his hand from Dot’s a little jerkily and crosses them in his lap again, feeling that strange mixture of guilt and frustration rise. Rather than the usual sort of unfounded want to please, he finds himself hoping Dot feels bad, embarrassment burning in his cheeks. “’Cause I don’t,” he evades, shrugging, echoing her previous movements. “It’s complicated.”

Dot does that little disbelieving nod that she does when she’s unsatisfied with what Paul’s told her and turns her body away from him slightly, looking even more ticked off than she did beforehand. Paul finds the sudden surge of malice leave him at her expression and the familiar desperate bottomless feeling in his stomach returns, clamouring at him to make up with her and stop that awful silent disappointment face she’s wearing. He smiles a little, a little ‘sorry?’ smile and an unspoken apology, but she just ignores him stoutly. “I love you, but you’re an idiot sometimes,” she says, still facing away but with an affectionate edge to her voice, and Paul lets himself relax back into the seats, shoulders releasing tension he didn’t even know they’d built up.

“I- I know I am.” The three words go carefully forgotten, swept under the carpet like if he doesn’t think about them they’ll just disappear.

When they get back it’s nearly eight and Dot says goodbye outside the station, one suede clad shoe in a puddle and delicate eyes squinting in the golden evening light, looking more subdued than Paul remembers seeing her in a long time. He kisses her on the mouth and pretends like he means it, even if it just means she will stop looking so sad, but when they break apart she just seems more desperate to go.

-

Paul leaves school with seven O levels. He calls up John when he gets his results back just as an excuse to speak to him, because John never calls anyone nowadays, just sits in his bedroom smoking out of the window and getting drunk off the lager he keeps under his bed. He gets a string of uninterested ‘oh’s and ‘right’s in reply before John unexpectedly hangs up in the middle of Paul’s sentence. It stings and the chorus of _not good enough not good_ _enough_ buzzes in the back of his mind as he puts the phone down and tries to convince himself that John’s like that with everyone.

That night he sits and smokes on the docks and listens to the distant foghorns, legs dangling over the lip of the harbour, shoes a few feet above the murky green water. He tells himself that his A stars don’t matter and he was two marks off a D in maths, and besides he shouldn’t expect people to be proud of him anyway.

-

One Sunday night Paul climbs out of the bathroom window and sits on the roof again. He watches the planes fly across the sky and wonders where they’re going. America, maybe? Australia? Africa? China?

Paul imagines that he’s on a plane, that he’s looking down on Liverpool, miles and miles above Allerton and Forthlin Road and his father, on the way to America where it’s warm and bright and everybody’s welcome, black or white or queer or straight or a mixture. He imagines John sat in the seat next to him, making stupid comments about the hostesses, and his guitar safely in the luggage department. He imagines playing to sold out stadiums and kissing beautiful people and long nights in the summer heat with John, and then he slips back in through the window and stares at the ceiling of his tiny bedroom in Liverpool with the door missing and the wallpaper slowly peeling.

-

Paul’s father breaks his nose and passes out in the kitchen with his coat still on. Paul knows that he should probably go to the hospital, but instead he grabs a bottle of whiskey from on top of the kitchen cabinet and drinks until his face doesn’t hurt anymore. The liquid burns his throat and makes his sinuses heavy and stuffy, but in a good way, a way that numbs not only his features but the nasty chorus of thoughts in the dark back room of his brain until they’re gone completely. Four glasses in he can’t distinguish his feet from his legs any more.

At some point he thinks he calls John, but the phone just rings and rings, taunting him, and Paul falls asleep like that, sat in the hallway, with the phone receiver in one hand and a half empty bottle of whiskey in the other.

When he wakes up it’s to his father booting him in the side and telling him to move, and whatever Paul remembers from the night before is lost before he’s even rolled over to vomit.

-

The neighbours hear what goes on, Paul’s sure of it. Sometimes Paul’s father shouts so loud the windowpanes rattle. Sometimes Paul screams back and number fifteen’s dog howls. Sometimes he sits on the roof and cries, and he knows that number eighteen’s window is open and only a few feet away from him.

People have noticed the bruises. They’re more and more obvious these days because Paul’s father’s stopped caring about much at all. Occasionally they rise above his collarbones, bloom across his cheeks and his chin and swell up his eyes, but no one ever questions them anymore.

It’s evident that no one cares much. Why should they?

-

John doesn’t talk about his mother after the day in the phone booth. The band is patient with him for a few months, and slowly he starts showing up to more and more practices, looking better and better with each one, less haggard and world-weary, and eventually Paul starts booking gigs again. After a while he’s back to normal – or, as normal as you can be after your mother’s died –  less angry and torn up. Paul reckons he’s even a little calmer than he was beforehand.

The only time he ever tries to bring her up is way past midnight on a cold evening when they’re top and tailing, wrapped up in duvets and blankets, John pleasantly tipsy and in an amicable mood. Paul doesn’t even finish her name before John’s yelling at him to shut up before he does it for him and goes to sleep with his pulse still strung taut and humming.

-

Paul thinks that the rest of the band begins to notice one day when he shows up at the Cavern with a slowly purpling string of bruises around his neck and a dangerous cant to the way he walks. John shoots him a look from under his eyebrows and Paul catches George glancing at Colin questioningly.

A problem arises almost immediately in that Paul’s forgotten his guitar. He’d left the house in a rush, desperate to get away, and it’s still leaning against the wall of his bedroom. John notices, thank fuck, avoiding an awkward explanation; but when John places a hand on his shoulder to guide him to some quieter corner Paul yanks his arm away so fast the joint clicks. John looks a little awkward for a second and shoves the offending hand into the pocket of his leathers.

“You alright?” he says eventually, scuffing his feet on the floor.

“Fucking peachy,” Paul shoots back, voice hoarse, holding John’s gaze stubbornly. “Just- fucking great. Amazing, even.” He takes a deep, shaking breath and rubs at his eyes tiredly. Because that’s all he is. Bone crushingly tired. Tired of hurting, tired of no one caring. He’s fucking sick of it all and the shitshow that is his life, of waking up every morning and being scared and nervous and having barely enough money to keep going and getting no sleep around the ceaseless nightmares.

He’s just tired of being tired.

“I want to leave,” he says suddenly.

“We’ve got a gig to play-”

“I ‘aven’t got a fuckin’ guitar or a voice, have I?” Paul snaps, voice raising. “An’ I just- I want to go.”

And then he’s crying like he told himself he wouldn’t do in front of John. Crying like a fucking baby or a small child who’s been told he can’t have what he wants, and he sits down against the wall with his knees up like he does when his father’s kicking him with his head under his arms and cries these bitter tears. And John sits next to him and picks out little melodies on his guitar and just waits and Paul’s never loved anyone more.

After a little while the tears stop and he mumbles “sorry” into John’s shoulder. He’s sure that George and Colin must have seen him or at least heard him, but they don’t say anything and even if they did, Paul wouldn’t care.

They end up playing the gig without him. Paul sits at the corner of the stage and sings along and snorts as John pulls face at him whilst he sings and wonders what he would do without this stupid fucking band.

-

In winter, the nest of birds in the garden fly away. They make beautiful arching patterns through the sky and Paul watches them from the roof and wishes more than anything that he was one of them.

-

“I’m scared,” Paul says down the phone at three thirty in the morning. The sky is still solid black and and unwavering and snowflakes are settling on the windowpane in slowly melting crystallised drifts, and the sound of the wind is murmuring faintly from outside. His feet are cold and the tip of his nose is white and the plastic against his face is like ice, and the mug of tea he’d made fifteen minutes before is sat cool on the floor, forgotten. The urge to call had started around the same time as the snow had started to fall, illuminated by the lamp by the window and ghostly white against the dark backdrop, and Paul can’t fathom why it was so unsettling.  

“So fuckin’ scared, Johnny,” he says quietly, whispered like someone will hear him, and already the damp, cracking sound of tears showing through his voice, though the heating got turned off two weeks ago and Paul’s fairly sure if he cried it would freeze on his face.

A car drives past the house, wheels splashing in the melted sludge of the previous snowfall. Paul can’t help but shiver at the wet sound and huddles closer into the blanket wrapped around his shoulders, probably more for comfort than warmth. “’N cold. I’m pretty cold too.”

John shuffles on the end of the line and the sound of a yawn echoes through the phone. Absently Paul imagines what John would look like, all dishevelled and off-guard, bundled up in too loose pyjamas and the unholy amount of sheets on his bed. “I’ve got spare blankets if you want them. And a spare half of the bed, now you mention it,” John says warmly, sleepily, and the kindness and affection in his voice, so unlike his usual demeanour, makes Paul’s stomach knot. It isn’t an unpleasant feeling, and it stays with him even as he’s shivering on a night bus to Menlove as the snow settles heavy on the roads.

-

It’s raining and Paul sits in a phone booth. He can’t feel his feet and one of his teeth is missing and when John gets there he just says “Oh, Paul.”

Paul doesn’t want to go to the hospital. They prod and poke and ask far too many questions for his liking and the smell of disinfectant seems to stick to his clothes and skin for days on end, and he’s spent long enough in them for a lifetime anyway. John’s years of training from whining at Mimi haven’t been wasted though, and within twenty minutes Paul’s on a bus to the Liverpool Royal with John’s arm around him (to stop him falling into the aisle, John insists). And, of course, John’s cheek resting atop his head (because John’s tired. Or so he says).

“You’ve got to stop lettin’ ‘im do this to you,” John says quietly into the top of Paul’s hair. He smells like asphalt and new leather. It’s not an unpleasant aroma. “You’re gonna die one day, Macca. And then what would I do?”

Paul shrugs with a little difficulty, ignoring the twinge of pain in his left shoulder. “Get on with your life?”

Above him, John sighs, frustrated, in the way parents do when their child asks something particularly stupid. “Let’s run away,” he says, stretching an arm out in front of him as if opening a curtain on something. Paul thinks that maybe he is. Maybe he did back when he first met Paul and decided that the little chubby baby-faced thing he was was worth a chance. “Let’s just hop on a bus an’ go somewhere.”

“Anywhere,” Paul agrees, looking up at John, and in the wintery light he looks like a character out of a film, one of those Western ones with the grand, sweeping soundtracks, with his strong jawed face and intelligent eyes and proper shaped nose. Paul feels a swell of affection and turns his face into the leather of John’s jacket. “America,” he says suddenly, reverence in his voice. John would fit in in America, the land of beautiful people and big ideas. “Let’s go to America.”

“Cracking,” John says, a hint of a smile on his lips, and squeezes Paul’s shoulder. “Sorted. America it is, Paulie.”

-

Mike comes to visit a little over a year after he left. He looks happier, more filled out and less pale, and smiles and laughs a whole lot more than Paul remembers. It hurts, aches to realise that this is a Mike that Paul never knew, buried under layers of fear for years. He wonders if there’s a Paul that he’s never known.

“How’s da?” Mike asks quietly when they’re sat on Paul’s bed, an Eddie Cochran record slowly buzzing away in the background. Paul doesn’t really like it, but it’s better to have it playing than not because the silences between them are always stuffy and suffocating. Mike keeps glancing at the missing door and the new dent in the drywall, and Paul marvels at how much has changed in the last year while he’s been gone. He’s missed a lot of legendary shouting matches.

Paul considers saying that he’s fine. Better, even. That he’s got the drinking under control and maybe things are getting better for the both of them. But some twisted part of him wants Mike to knows that while he’s living it up in Ireland Paul’s still suffering, and he looks picks at a loose thread in the covers for a little while before replying.

“He’s still angry,” he decides on eventually. Mike nods mutely. The record runs out and they sit staring at the bedclothes in uncomfortable silence.

-

A lot of the time Paul finds himself with nothing to do, so he gets a job in a bar down the docks. Serving drinks and wiping tables isn’t something he pictured himself doing, but he’s got gigs to play every other night and working is better than sitting at home and stewing in his own misery. Sometimes the lads come down on a night when he works and John hangs over the bar with a pint in his hand, making sleazy comments about the waitresses and pestering Paul for free drinks.

They let him sing for a quid or two sometimes, up on the stage with his guitar, and it’s odd playing by himself, without the warm shape of John pressed into his side and his rough voice in his ear. He’s not sure whether he likes it or not.

-

Dot calls and wakes Paul up on a Tuesday and from the moment she starts speaking Paul knows there’s something wrong.

“We need to talk, Paul,” she sighs in a tone heavy with finality. Paul’s heart sinks and a million different scenarios race through his head. Is she pregnant? Or ill? Christ, he doesn’t think he can go through any more hospital stays.

“I think we should stop seeing each other.”

Paul almost sighs in relief, but stops himself in the nick of time. “Why?” he asks instead, trying to seem as shocked and put out as possible.

“We just haven’t got time for each other.” She makes a small, sad sound, and Paul suddenly feels more than a little bad for her, guilt writhing in his chest. It sounds like she genuinely has been tearing herself up over this. He wonders if she has any idea that when they kiss he imagines John’s mouth instead of hers.

Predictably, Paul spends the rest of the day in a terrible mood. He lies on his bed in a huff for most of the afternoon and then accidentally breaks a glass and gets shouted at. When he calls up George to calm himself down he ends up having a fight with him so he resigns himself to listening to the Chuck Berry record his mother gave him that last Christmas together, low and humming over the sound of the blustery wind. Somehow counteracting anger with sadness just makes it all worse and when he sleeps his dreams are miserable and sticky and slow like hot tar.

-

Paul’s father comes into some money. How, Paul doesn’t (want to) know. It puts him in an amicable mood for a little while and he’s pleasant enough, as if Paul hasn’t noticed the expensive liquor building up on the back shelf of the pantry.

All good things come to an end though and Paul spends hours on a Wednesday night scrubbing blood out from between his toes and under his nails. It’s funny, he muses, how when he was six he wanted to be a doctor or a teacher or a fireman, not a scared, bruised teenager who cleans up his father’s vomit and picks glass shards out of his skin each evening.

-

“So,” John says down the phone, and Paul can hear the thinly veiled excitement behind his conversational tone. “What’s new?”

“Spare me the shite, Johnny,” Paul replies good-naturedly, sitting down cross legged on the floor with the receiver cradled between his ear and shoulder. He’d been halfway through a bacon sarnie when the phone began to ring and he’s sure that John’s appreciating the sound of him chewing. Serves the silly bugger right for calling at eight thirty on a Saturday. “What’s got your knickers in a twist, then?”

“Well, I shan’t be telling if you take that tone with me,” John sniffs haughtily, putting on an affected accent, and Paul can almost imagine the stupid face he’s pulling. Already John’s infectious happiness leaking through his words is beginning to take an effect on Paul and he can feel a smile tugging at his lips.

“Ah, get on with it, Lennon,” he chides, picking at a scab on his wrist idly, trying to sound calm and couldn’t-care-less.

There’s a moment of silence, like John’s collecting himself. “We’re going to Germany,” he says suddenly, breathlessly. “Next week. Who knows how long for, could be months.”

“Christ.” The realisation hits Paul so hard he sits back straight against the wall like he’s been pushed. He’s already grinning, already got that white hot thrill pumping through his veins. “You’re having me on, aren’t you? Aren’t you, John?”

“I’m not.” John’s on the verge of laughing and his voice is coming out all strained and happy and excited. “I’m not, I swear blind, Macca. Monday next week and we’re running away to fuckin’ Hamburg!”

And then Paul starts to laugh. And John down the other end of the line starts to laugh too, and then they’re both in hysterics, these two boys with nothing but guitars and voices and lyric sheets from Liverpool who want to be bigger than Elvis, and for once in Paul’s life it feels like everything is going right.

-

It’s warm and dry and Paul slips out of the back window at eight o’clock sharp and shimmies down the drainpipe to where John is waiting, the amber August dusk laying golden across his features and the warm breeze in his hair.

“I’m free,” Paul says simply as they wait at the bus stop and listen to the crickets. “Like the birds, Johnny.”

John stares down the wide expanse of road and is very quiet.

“Paul,” he says eventually, staring straight into Paul’s face with a look that could melt steel. Paul’s stomach does a strange somersault, like it’s tying itself into a bow, and he almost feels like he might vomit or start hyperventilating, or both. As hard as he tries he can’t tear his eyes from John’s. Vaguely he’s aware that John’s hand is on his knee. “Paul, look at me.”

Somewhere a dog barks but Paul can barely hear it over the blood rushing it his ears. It feels as though he’s suspended in treacle, limbs stiff and heavy, his thoughts a low buzz of _johnjohnjohnjohn,_ and he’s sure that if he tried to talk past his tongue it would come out a garbled mess. And just when Paul reckons he’ll have to look away before his racing pulse gives him a coronary, John leans forward and kisses him. Right there, sat in a dingy bus stop in Allerton where anyone could see. But Paul doesn’t care.

When their lips move together it’s so natural, so _normal,_ not at all like any other person Paul’s ever kissed. Not like Dot, who was too sweet and sickly, or like the other nameless girls he’d snogged in the clubs who tasted of cheap vodka and other men’s aftershave. Maybe it’s because he and John are just natural too. Maybe it’s because falling in love with John was so natural, so seamless and smooth, that Paul didn’t really notice that it was happening until it already had.

-

They load Pete’s drums onto the bus (much to the joy of the irate bus driver) with surprising efficiency and Paul’s buzzing, in too much of a good mood to even get fucked off with Stu. He feels beyond cloud nine, elated, like he’s just taken a whole tube of uppers at once, and he can’t stop catching John’s eye and then bursting into laughter. Somehow the nerves of the journey have dissipated into fizzing excitement and joy, just the ecstatic anticipation to get away from the dark, grey nightmare of Forthlin Road.

They serenade the disgruntled looking old lady near the front with an acoustic set. She presses the stop button before they even get halfway through Maggie Mae, and Paul cackles so hard his head hurts.

-

Paul notices very quickly that Hamburg is about as far from Liverpool as you can get, and not just geographically. From the moment he steps out of the train (fourteen hours of listening to John ramble and Stu whinge and George snore in a swelteringly hot tinny compartment) the change is evident.

The cobblestones are almost coated in a mixture of ambiguous fluids and the sky, where there should be stars, is grey and smoggy, even more so than Liverpool. If Paul listens carefully he can hear raucous music over the sound of the train puffing away behind them, and the faint shrill of a wolf whistle cuts through the air from some street nearby. You can almost smell the sex in the air, that sweaty, smoky scent, and even John is looking around the dingy station where half the windows are smashed in with something like nerves on his face.

A thrill of terrified excitement runs through Paul’s body, settling in his chest like a bubble. He thinks about home and bruises and the missing door and what Liverpool sounds like from the roof at two in the morning-

And then Pete’s complaining to him about getting his drums off of “that _bloody_ death trap” and Liverpool is miles and miles away the air is electric and Paul couldn’t be happier.

-

“She was about five miles wide, I swear, Macca.” John is lounging on the top bunk next to the frankly offensive white lightbulb, playing with a plectrum, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. Paul can almost smell the jacket from where it’s discarded on the floor six feet away, and he probably isn’t much better himself after hours and hours jumping around in a stuffy hall under bright lights.

“Just your type then,” he replies, and John makes a lazy protesting sound. “When can we be expecting an announcement?”

“Shut up, you,” John says, a smile softening the edge of his words. He swings his legs over the side of the narrow bunk and the rickety frame creaks; Paul wonders absently how long it will take before it breaks and they’ll have to sleep on the floor.

John reaches down for his guitar, yawning. “Careful, your top E’s nearly broken,” Paul reminds him, grabbing his own instrument. John rolls his eyes. “When was the last time you tuned it?”

“The day before yesterday, _mother_ ,” John replies snarkily and gives the Zenith a short, cut-off strum. Paul picks out a little melody, one that’s been bouncing around his head for a few days, and John makes a little sound of approval, playing a short couple of chords.

“Play it again,” he orders, and Paul does. He listens as the notes fit in with the chords in a jarring but satisfying sort of way, all sharp notes and minor keys, and reminds himself that he loves what music can do to him. For a second it’s like he’s not himself anymore, but someone, some _thing_ else, something that has complete control over something as beautiful as music. Maybe if he can’t have anything else he can just have his guitar.

“Alright, Paul?” John says, startling Paul out of his thoughts.

Maybe he can have his guitar, and John.

“Yeah. Yeah,” he replies slowly, as if he isn’t sure what he’s saying. John nods almost suspiciously and returns his focus to his guitar.

“Once more? I was thinking a D minor-”

“I love you.”

Paul doesn’t know where the sudden pulse of affection comes from, and the words slip out of his mouth before he even knows they’re being formed in his throat. But he really does, he really does love John, and maybe this is him realising that he loves more than his face and his body and the way he kisses. It’s him realising he loves John’s voice and his humour and the way they both fit together like chords and melodies and suddenly it’s just too overwhelming to keep inside. He realises he’s sat forward at a slant, staring fixatedly at John, who’s gone a peculiar pink colour on the tops of his ears like a teenager, and Paul almost feels as if he’s ten again and kissing some girl for the first time, with uncertainty fizzing in his throat and at the tips of his fingers.

Finally- “Christ, Macca,” John says, sounding slightly hoarse, and Paul almost laughs at John’s inability to process emotions. “Love you too.”

Music, and John. Paul’s happy with that.

-

Paul would like to pretend that things are fine. And while he’s got John and the Reeperbahn and the crowds who howl along with them every evening, he’s also got nightmares and long, preludin-fuelled nights and the rain that hammers against the cobblestones in the winter, and sometimes he does just sit in the damp, claustrophobic little back room and breathe in through his nose and out through his mouth like John had taught him. He tries not to cry because he’s eighteen and fucking grown up but sometimes he finds himself curled up against John’s side at night with terror struggling in his throat and tears drying on his face.

Sometimes it gets too much, and the deafening noise of the crowd is less encouraging than terrifying and Paul can’t stop himself from freezing up in fear when the bar fights get too close. And sometimes he has to abandon his guitar against the drums and cling to John backstage for a few minutes while he hyperventilates and wishes that it wasn’t like this, heart going ten to the dozen and shoulders shaking however hard he tries to stop them.

John says it’s a learning curve, living without his father. It feels more like a learning spiral to Paul, but whether it’s heading upwards or downwards he’s not sure.

-

They get deported, eventually. John warned that it would happen – George is only seventeen and can barely even pull off that age, let alone eighteen. Of course, someone catches wind of it and there’s police knocking on the door of the Indra kitted out with bloody truncheons, looking all official and intimidating, demanding to see them as if they’ve robbed a bank or something. They aren’t impressed with their combined effort towards broken German and even get to the point of shouting angry German things and waving their sticks around like apes but eventually manage to convey that George is to be on a train home the next day. George complains and argues to the point of nearly being arrested, but eventually the decision is made.

The next day he’s left looking very contrite on the station platform with a warrant in one hand and his clothes in another. John waves goodbye dramatically like a grieving widow as George sticks his head out of the slowly departing train, flipping the bird and looking ridiculous with the wind whipping his hair into wild shapes.

The group isn’t much cop without lead guitar, and Stu has fucked off claiming to be ill with a cold, so really they’re just mucking around on stage with a piano, a couple of guitars and a drum set on its last legs, gaining more boo-hisses from the usually placid crowd than when they’d just started out. There really isn’t much point staying, so Paul doesn’t think twice about joining in when a bored Pete suggests a little recreational arson.

Paul hadn’t anticipated that the condom would produce so much acrid smoke or that the place even had any kind of smoke alarm or health and safety – Christ, the stage is made of old beer crates. Predictably the owner of the place isn’t too happy about having to evacuate the building on a freezing December night, and of course, the police don’t like it either, so Paul and Pete sit in a dripping holding cell at ten thirty on a Friday night with deportation warrants being written in their names at that very moment. A drunk sailor from the dock in the cell opposite leers at them through the bars, face pressed up against the metal and arm stretched out like he’s trying to grab at them.

“Want a kiss, schonling?” he slurs. Paul presses his back against the bars and tries to block out the scent of alcohol as Pete attempts to make himself comfortable on the concrete floor.

“Fucking hate this place,” he says under his breath, and Pete chuckles, closing his eyes.

“City of dreams, mate.”

-

It’s December and the wintery sun is surprisingly bright when Paul steps off of the train in Liverpool. There’s dim Christmas lights hanging off of the station roof, twinkling in the light, and frost dusting every available surface. It’s surprisingly pretty and peaceful after the bright neon signs advertising cathouses and strip clubs and the dirty, greasy streets of St. Pauli.

Paul’s got fifteen quid and half a sandwich stuffed into the pocket of his guitar case – his clothes, or what’s left of them, are still in Hamburg, tucked away under the bed in the damp little back room, and he’s been in his current jacket and drainies for nearly three days straight. It’s probably safe to say that he could be easily mistaken as a tramp if he’s not careful. He’d got plenty of pissed off glances from people on the way home and even Pete had complained as if he didn’t smell like German beer and sweat too.

The train pulls away. Paul digs out a pound and buys a cup of tea – a proper one, not the naff watery stuff you can get for pennies in Germany – and then sits on a bench and realises he has nowhere to go.

His father. Christ, his father; he hadn’t taken him into consideration, caught up in the excitement and freedom of Germany, but now there’s the looming terror back again, the prickling anxiety like tiny claws sinking into the back of his neck. Paul thinks about the bedroom with the wallpaper and the door and the dent in the drywall and it feels as though someone’s wrapped a piece of string around his windpipe and is slowly pulling it taut.

Immediately his thoughts go to John, but he won’t be back for another few days and he doubts that Mimi will want to see him. She thinks he’s ‘common’ and always seems to be looking at him sideways when he’s around, like she’s checking he isn’t stealing from her purse.

Paul’s been around George’s with split lips and sprained limbs far too often for a casual visit, and he knows his mother will probe and ask questions, so the obvious choice is to sleep on the Best’s settee for as long as he’s allowed. Fortunately, the Casbah Coffee club is ten times better than the Bambi Kino and Mrs Best is happy with a cobbled together excuse about Paul’s father being away in London, and honestly Paul will take anything rather than the house he’s been having nightmares about for the past five months.

-

John calls five days later and Mrs Best yells up the stairs until Paul hears her over a record he’s nicked from Pete’s shelf. He’s downstairs quicker than he knew he could run.

“Hello?” he says down the receiver, out of breath, and John laughs a little.

“Alright, love? Straight from the London marathon, I see,” he says dryly, and Paul checks that Mrs Best has left the hallway before replying.

“Just missed you, is all.”

“It’s only been a week, Macca, if that.”

“Still.” Paul studies the ground for a minute, cheeks heating up, embarrassed even though John isn’t there. “How’s his nibs?” he says suddenly, desperate to change the subject, even if it does have to be about Stu. There’s a sound over the line like someone sitting down, and Paul does the same, back cracking. He doesn’t know if he can sleep on the floor for a night longer.

“Apparently still dying of a cold,” John replies, and Paul is triumphant to hear scorn in his voice. “He’s staying over there with Astrid for a while. Don’t know if he’ll be coming back, really. I won’t miss him much; the silly bugger doesn’t even have an immune system, let alone any musical talent.”

“I know,” Paul laughs, and when he signs off the call with “love you” John replies with the same and for a while it’s perfect and Paul could just forget about it all.

-

They still play shows, though they seem tame compared to the dark, drunk ones they’d fumble through in Germany, and the pay is good. They’re better, louder than they were before, playing tighter and more in sync, and people notice. They’re being paid more, four or five pounds a gig now, and when you add that up to three bookings a week they’re certainly not poor anymore. It feels nice, not having to worry about affording new shoes or birthday presents or records. A pleasant change.

Housing wise, Paul quickly ditches Pete’s house for fear of overstaying his welcome and oscillates between John’s house and a youth hostel just outside of the docks. It’s better than it was before, so much better, and he doesn’t ever think about Forthlin Road and the acid smells of whiskey and blood.

-

Sometimes Paul and John go out and busk on corners at the docks. They don’t need the money but it’s just a laugh and an excuse for Paul to play his acoustic rather than the bass he’s been persuaded (blackmailed) into using. They call themselves ‘the Nerk Twins’ and the regulars at the Cavern sing along and at the end of the day it’s good to go home with coins in your pocket.

-

Occasionally the drunken barflies yell stuff like “dirty little queer!” and “faggot!” at Paul when he’s walking home. He supposes he is a little effeminate and they’re bound to do it sometimes, and no drunk ever has full control over his mouth. They’d do it in Germany, even come up to him with the cheek to treat him like a cathouse girl and ask him to suck them off for a few Deustche mark, but at least they did it in a language Paul doesn’t really understand. Paul had made a point to learn how to cuss in German for that sole purpose and situations had become violent more than a few times.

It used to bother him when he was younger, and he would get so angry and rant and rant at John about how it isn’t fair that he gets called queer just because of his face. It’s funny how he couldn’t care less nowadays.

-

It’s April and the sun is just starting to show through the blanket of grey that March seemed to bring, and they’re halfway through a much tamer version of Besame Mucho when Paul sees his father.

He’s stood a few metres away from them, on the outskirts of the crowd they’ve attracted, looking straight at Paul, almost sad looking. He looks older than Paul remembers, thinner and paler, with dark bags under his eyes and a hint of stubble over his jaw, and he’s still drinking – the bloodshot eyes and unsteady gait give that away. People are glancing at him, subtly moving away, Paul notices. Probably with pity, or disgust, or both. There’s a fine line. He looks more like a pathetic drunk than ever, like a weak, watered down caricature of the terrifying, powerful man Paul is still afraid of.

Paul doesn’t stop playing. He won’t. His vision whites a little at the edges and the suffocating anxiety begins to rise in his chest again, but he refuses to let the miserable, wretched man who terrorised him for ten years affect him, affect his music, anymore. Somehow he keeps moving his mouth and his fingers, although they feel as though they might start to shake, and his father holds his stare for five seconds more before slowly leaving in the opposite direction.

John asks him before they change over to Lend Me Your Comb what the matter is. Paul shakes his head and John nods and doesn’t ask again.

-

As all couples – if they can even be called a couple – do, John and Paul argue. Mostly it’s like it was before, nasty, petty little quarrels over things like song lyrics and politics and things as meaningless as the weather, because that’s just what John’s like. They don’t talk for a few hours or so and then one of them caves and it’s back to normal. Paul doesn’t think much of it, really.

They have their first big fight stood in the front hall of Paul’s house, amongst the muddy rugby boots and damp raincoats with the sky grey and thundery above them, and briefly while they’re shouting at each other Paul decides that this is no place to have an argument. It should be a lot more dramatic. Stood out in the rain somewhere, on a deserted beach or a clifftop or something. And it would help if one of them was a beautiful, busty girl like the ones in the movies. Not two lads stood in a dusty porch surrounded by old shoes and scarves, entwined in this twisted, odd relationship that should be inherently wrong but somehow isn’t.

And when John shouts, it’s not like when Paul’s father shouts, because that was just cruelty and hate; when John shouts it’s still John, and there’s more behind his voice, hurt and desperation and frustration. His words, however biting he makes them, can’t hit as hard as he’d like because at the end of the day he’s Paul’s John, the John that Paul’s known for knocking on four years now, and they love each other. Paul feels like a fawning, naïve teenage girl thinking that but it’s true, overwhelmingly so. And when he shouts back he knows that he’ll never cut as deep as he wants to.

He thinks about it when John’s stormed off down the road and he’s sat on the porch step listening to faraway thunder and counting the cars that drive by. He thinks, mind whirring over John’s words like a stuck record, until three days later when John calls in the early hours of a Saturday morning, all whispered apologies and misery, and he only really stops when he’s pressed against John’s chest, breathing in his warm, familiar smell as the dawn breaks outside.

-

Summer is far too warm for Paul’s liking. He spends a good portion of his time stretched out like a cat in John’s back garden listening to the pavement sizzle as John goes on about the scorching heat. For a good three weeks it feels too hot to even move. Rather than sharing a bed like the usually do, all tangled up with each other, they’ve resorted to sprawling on the cool wooden floors at night, sacrificing full use of their backs. The (short) shows that they do have twice a week in the Cavern are humid and sticky from the collective warmth of a hundred people all packed in a tiny, poorly-ventilated room. Paul has to wring his socks out in the sink, much to Mimi’s disgust.

Of course, the heat makes people cranky, John not excluded, and it’s barely a week into the heatwave when Paul’s walking back to Mendips with John hung over his shoulder sporting a split lip, a black eye and some nasty bruising, looking like a particularly sad clown.

“For Christ’s sake, John, you’re like a sack of potatoes,” Paul complains as they round the corner at the top of Menlove Road. John scowls – or tries to, past the swelling – and starts deliberately dragging his feet on the pavement like a petulant child having a tantrum.

“Better?”

“Aye, it’s gonna be like that, is it?” Paul scolds. John rolls his eyes and starts to walk normally again. He spits a little more blood onto the side of the road.

“It’s a wonder I ‘aven’t lost a tooth.” A fair point. John had picked a fight with the largest, most riled up drunk he could find over something stupid like a recent game of football and hadn’t had the sense to duck when a fist had been aimed at his mouth. Eventually Paul and another couple of blokes had broken the scuffle up, but not before John had earned himself an impressive shiner that could probably go down in history books and a rather large, enthusiastic crowd. People watched with a sort of interested horror, like you’d stop to rubberneck at a car crash. They should make ‘drunk John Lennon’ into a spectator sport.

“I tell you what, it’s a wonder you didn’t get a knife in the guts. Only you’d have a barney with a dock worker.” John looks even more fucked off at this and looks off down the road fucked off-edly to avoid making eye contact with Paul.

They get in through the door at just gone eleven and Mimi’s nowhere to be seen, off to do whatever old people do in their spare time, probably ruining the economy or making young children cry or something. Paul near drags John up the stairs and into the bathroom and almost immediately begins rummaging around in the cupboards for TCP.

“Careful where you look, Macca, you never know what you’ll find in there,” John says from his seat on the closed toilet, rubbing his jaw. Paul sends a disgusted look his way and keeps on searching. “What are you trying to find anyway?”

“TCP. For that cut on your lip.”

“Oh, we ‘aven’t got any of that,” John says, and Paul looks up, appalled.

“What kind of a house doesn’t have TCP?”

John shrugs. “This house. We’re heathens. What use is it really?”

“Cleans up cuts. You’ve always got to have it around, in case you get hit.” John doesn’t reply and Paul realises what he’s just said and looks at the tiled floor for a second rather than at John. He suddenly doesn’t miss the obnoxious smell of the antiseptic at all. “Anyway.” He clears his throat. “It doesn’t matter. Pass me that flannel.”

-

Paul sometimes wonders what the weather is like in Ireland, and what Mike’s doing over there. Paul hasn’t seen him in over a year and the fact that he’ll be seventeen now makes something nostalgic and regretful squeeze in his chest.

He uses the hostel’s phone to call the familiar number, the plastic warm from the suffocating temperature of the building as he brings it up to his face. His Aunty Jin answers first and spends a good five minutes fussing over Paul and asking him things like “Where have you been?” and “Why haven’t you called?” and “How’s your father?” -which Paul goes a little quiet at. Eventually she stops nattering on (she’s even worse than John) hands over to Mike.

Mike’s voice has dropped and he would almost sound like someone else, if not for the accent (even that’s slowly turning a little Irish) and the little mannerisms and phrases he’d picked up from their mother. From the get go he sounds disengaged and asks mostly the same questions, sounding less interested as the call goes on, and Paul just hums and nods and wonders what he’s done to deserve a father that beats him and a mother who’s dead and a brother who might as well be a stranger.

-

The nightmares come and go. Mostly Paul wakes up from them with his pulse raised a little and his breath coming quick, and goes back to sleep within twenty minutes or so with the warm shape of John pressed against his back. He forgets them by morning.

Sometimes, though, the dreams aren’t so much dreams, but terrifying recounts of hiding under desks and having glass bottles smashed over his head and bones snapping and cuts opening, all in disturbingly vivid detail. It’s like someone’s going through Paul’s brain and hitting rewind on the worst memories they can find. It’s these times that he wakes up with noises trapped in his throat, arms and legs completely frozen and his father’s glazed over glare tattooed on the back of his eyelids. John lets him cry and shake and doesn’t pass judgement and Paul can hear him quietly cursing his father out as he falls back asleep.

-

“It’ll get better,” John says. He sounds tired and quiet in the dark and his voice has lost an element of its rough Scouse accent like it does when he’s not putting it on to seem tougher than he really is. Paul makes a little noise which sounds like defeat to him and presses his face further into the warmth of John’s chest. The rain is hammering against the window and the thin sound of wind whistling through the rafters drifts into the bedroom from the roof. Paul shivers. He hates storms.

“Promise?” Paul knows that he sounds like a three year old but some shaky little part of him needs the reassurance, needs the stability. Something to stop the constant anxious writhe of snakes in the pit of his stomach that steal all his air.

A sigh, and a slight chuckle. “Swear on me mum, Macca,” he replies, and the usual boisterousness of his voice is back.

Paul smiles even though John won’t see it. He fists a hand in John’s ratty shirt and shuffles closer, pressed to John’s side like a limpet, and it reminds him how he will never stop being surprised by how John, tall and skinny and compromised mainly of angles, manages to be so comfortable. “Love you,” he says, muffled, and John tightens his arm around Paul’s shoulder.

“Love you too.”

-

John’s twenty first birthday is on a wet day suspended in that awkward weather period when summer hasn’t quite given in to winter and you’re cold in the morning and then uncomfortably warm in your clothing in the afternoon. Paul glances out of John’s bedroom window on the day to be met with indecisive grey skies and damp tarmac and sighs as he flings open the curtains.

“Jesus Christ, Paul,” John says from where he’s still starfished on the bed, turning his face into the pillow and muffling his words. “S’like you’ve opened the gates of heaven.”

“Aye, if heaven had a strong chance of rain at two o’clock,” Paul replies. He hits John gently on the leg as he passes the bed and John groans and kicks half-heartedly like a sulking toddler. “Come on, you lazy sod, it’s nearly ten.”

“And?”

“I’ll do a fry up if you’re up in the next fifteen minutes.”

John’s out of bed in the blink of an eye and is already rifling through the wardrobe for clothes. “Shower first, you nasty bugger!” Paul calls over his shoulder as he leaves the room and pads down the wooden stairs, leaving John muttering sarcastically while searching for a towel in the cupboard.

Mimi is listening to the radio in the living room when Paul gets downstairs. “Morning, Mimi,” he says politely (he hasn’t stopped being a little intimidated by her yet despite living in Mendips for the best part of a year now; he’s only just stopped calling her Ms Smith). By the time John’s downstairs, the rain has started to fall, crackling on the dry leaves in the garden and running down the windows. John doesn’t seem to care and positively devours his food, earning himself a scolding from Mimi for it.

“It’s like I lost me mum and got two in return,” John says under his breath when she’s out of earshot. Paul sticks out his tongue from across the table, which probably isn’t very sanitary with a mouthful of food but feels appropriate anyway.

After they’ve finished Paul presents John with several plectrums because most of his old ones are splintered and dull, along with a couple of records that John’s been on about for weeks. Because he’s overly sentimental he slips in a dog-eared copy of the Del Vikings single that John had been singing the first time they’d met, which John looks positively delighted with.

“You sap,” he says, but his laugh and the softness of his eyes take away the bite of his words. “God, you become more and more like Cynthia every day.”

“Bought that the day after I met you,” Paul says, tracing the lettering on the slightly faded cover. Somehow he can’t bring himself to look at it for very long for fear of that achingly nostalgic feeling yawning in his chest. “Wanted to be like you so bad. You could’ve asked me to do anything an’ I’d have done it.”

“But has anything changed, my dear?” John grins like a wolf. It strikes Paul that nothing really has. He’s less in awe of John that he was that day in ’57, older and less naïve, but now he’s made up for that in affection and, well, love; stopped being scared and excited by him and started seeing him for the flawed person he is and loving him more for it. He’s not a frightened just barely fifteen-year-old living under the shadow of his mother’s death and his father’s drunkenness anymore. John’s mellowed out, more content, not an unhappy boy disenchanted with his family and his school and his world. They’ve come such a long way in four years, but Paul’s still got the same adoration that he had for the older boy from the day he first heard him sing.

But he can’t say that, now, can he?

“Nah. Ask me to jump under a bus, I’d be out there before you could finish your sentence.”

“You wearing your best knickers though?”

“Only the best for your twenty-first, Johnny.”

After they’ve made more suggestive comments than necessary and cleaned up Paul drags John out into the shed for what he refers to as the ‘main event’. John makes an “ooh” sound but still complains when his carefully styled hair is somewhat flattened by the pouring rain as Paul fumbles with the key.

“Shouldn’t ‘ave spent so long on it, then,” Paul chides as he opens up the door. The shed is tiny and cramped and smells a little musty like all sheds do. Dust dances in the light from the tiny window and is centimetres thick on the wooden shelving. Christ knows what there is hidden away in here – Mimi had had to look for the key for ages when Paul had asked for it, admitting that she hadn’t been in there for years. Paul estimates about a tonne of gardening equipment and at least six dead animals. All he really cares about, though, is the carefully wrapped package in the far corner, hidden away just in case John had come in for any reason.

Paul hauls the box out from under a pile of gloves – for _camouflage_ – and John raises an eyebrow expectantly. “What’s this, then?”

“Oh, sure, I’ll just tell you shall I?”

“Shut up.” John grabs for the box. “Give it here, then.” He tears into the paper like a wild thing and Paul watches with amusement. It’s like seeing a dog with the mail. When John gets to the plain box he makes the customary joke of, “oh, a cardboard box, just what I wanted,” and Paul makes the customary response “just you wait, there could be packaging paper inside,” and then John gets down to the real thing.

He pulls out a black and white Rickenbacker 325, all smooth glossed surfaces and curved edges, and Paul fancies he can hear his jaw hit the ground. It’s a step up from his old guitar and cost more than a bit, almost more than Paul could afford, but after months of saving busking money and gig pay he’d finally been able to order it from the shop down the docks. It’s safe to say he’d felt a little important ordering the instrument, even more so walking down the docks with it across his back. It was almost like he’d been a rock star or something with this eighty pound guitar over his shoulder, even though no one else had seen it.

“Well fuck me sideways,” John says, a smile crossing his face, something like reverence in his voice, and immediately Paul feels the warm, bubbling sensation of having pleased someone tugging at the corners of his mouth. John runs a hand over the varnished body and up the strings and gives it a strum, letting the clean sound of a perfectly tuned chord echo around the small room.

“You like it then?” Paul asks eagerly, squeezing his hands together so tight his knuckles go white. He chides himself silently for being so anxious. _This is John. John appreciates these kind of things._

“Do I like it?” John says incredulously, setting it carefully down against a wall. “Paul, you daft get, I bloody love it!” He surges up into Paul’s space, placing his hands either side of his face, and starts pressing silly little kisses all over his cheeks, his nose, his forehead, muttering words in between. “Christ- Paul- love you- so much-”

“Love you too, Johnny,” Paul says through laughter, scrunching up his face and batting gently at John’s chest, even though the last thing he wants him to do is stop. John grins and huffs out a chuckle and pulls Paul tight into his chest and if Paul could just freeze time and make everything stop and preserve this moment in a bottle he wouldn’t think twice. He breathes in the smell of John, cigarettes and soap and hair grease and decides that this is how he wants it to be. Somehow it’s how he’s always wanted it to be, even when he was young and scared and unsteady. Waiting for John. Waiting for moments like these.

“Yer fuckin’ cracking, you are,” John says happily and Paul hums.

“Know I am.”

Laughing, John lets him go, swiping up his guitar from against the wall and holding it like a baby. “Feel like Little Richard playing this,” he muses fondly, and Paul can already sense the deep and profound bond he’s going to have with the instrument. It’s a wonder he hasn’t named it yet. “Come on then, let’s escape before the rain starts again.”

Mimi seems mildly impressed with the Rickenbacker, which is a step up from indifferent, at least. Paul wonders if she knows how much it cost. Maybe then she wouldn’t think of him as common. He doesn’t really mind because John seems absolutely smitten and he’s the one who owns it anyway, and they spend the best part of the afternoon mucking around on it, butchering the ukulele chords of Come Go With Me that John had played on that day in Woolton.

Sometime in the afternoon Mimi announces up the stairs that she’s got a final present for John, and when both boys come thundering down the stairs she shoos off Paul, insisting that it’s a private matter.

“She’s about to entrust her collection of sex toys upon you,” Paul whispers in John’s ear, but only after making absolutely sure Mimi isn’t within listening range. Saying she’s terrifying when she’s angry is an understatement and a half.

“Aye, you’d love that, wouldn’t you?” John snipes back and does the last few stairs in one before bowing sarcastically to Mimi’s back and sliding into the living room behind her, winking at Paul and shutting the door.

Feeling slightly left out, Paul returns to the bedroom and busies himself reworking the shit bassline he’d written for one of their new songs, absently pondering the form of the mysterious final present. Mimi hadn’t said anything to Paul much to do with John’s birthday really, and her gifts to her nephew hadn’t had much significance. Or to Paul at least. He assumes it will be either be money or something very Mimi-ish, like a trip to London or place in a fancy school (God forbid). Eventually Paul hears John’s footsteps quick on the stairs under the dull, un-amped thrum of his bass and smiles as Mimi’s shrill “you sound like a herd of elephants!” echoes from downstairs.

John sidles into the bedroom with a white envelope in his hands, the picture of nonchalance, and Paul immediately recognises his expression as the one he wears when he’s concealing a secret. “What was it?” he demands excitedly. “An’ don’t try and bullshit me, Lennon.”

Smiling a wide Cheshire grin, John leans against the dresser, chucking the envelope in Paul’s direction. “What about a holiday to Paris, babe?”

**Author's Note:**

> i hope you enjoyed this, because for me, writing this was an amazing challenge!!  
> the paris trip is now posted, check it out if you want!


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